I am Progress
by Krahae
Summary: A dream. This time easier to categorize, and shuffle into it's pretty white box. Mind the rating.


More dreams. Napping comfortably on the couch can be dangerous. When one's roommates are grilling half a deer on a grill on the deck, and the other is playing Resident Evil...

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**I am Progress**

I wake up, and it's cold. It's always cold...

I have to remind myself it's me that's cold. White walls greet me as they have for the last year on waking. This is my world. One big, extraordinarily large plastic bubble.

I remember being bitter. Remembering what it was that I was here for. Because of. A war. People dying by the millions, at the hands and teeth of those that were once people. Things changing them. Changing me.

I stood hastily, pushing memories from my mind. Time now for the living, not the dead. I had things to do. Walking up to a panel in a wall, I laid my hand on it, and as I did the wall lit, and a pain shot through my hand. A small screen, previously dead and black lit up, warning and biohazard alerts dancing madly on it's surface a moment before being shuffled away, information next. I quirked the corner of a lip, watching the symbol dance there a moment. Black and red. Eight triangle panels, elongate, longest points meeting in the center.

One solution, one world. Umbrella.

Hell of a solution to the world, I thought bitterly.

I look up at the the ever-present little black eye that watches me. Waving, smiling, I begin one more minute in what seems like the only day I ever have. Wake, lab, test, sleep. All the hundreds of days I'd done this, all blurring together. One, long, sterile white nightmare.

The labs were around me before I realized it. Blood drawn. No changes. Hours and hours torturing myself, injections, chemicals. Trying to undo this thing that I was. Typhoid Mary for a new eon. Need to change the thing that coils in me, sneaking out with each breath, riding passenger in every cell inside me.

Progress was made. I was progress, so to speak. Functionally immortal, unaging. Resistant to everything. Regenerating. Daily it was put to the test. Sighing, I placed my left hand into the clear glass box, utterly bored and used to this place, this situation, this resistance. A moment later a lance of pain arced through my wrist and my hand was left in the box, various chemical agents acting on it, focused beams of this or that kind of radiation, or particle bombardment, all in rapid succession, as they tested again, each day, how to kill me.

I held up the unbleeding nothing that was my hand. A small spike of my will and my flesh surged, warping and twisting below the sudden void, as bone and sinew surged and writhed into place. Coiling like blind snakes, tissue wrapped and settled around and formed the new appendage. A few moments, and I focused, making sure that my hand was human, not a reaction to the pain. Walking back to a panel, similar to the one I'd started the day with, I lay the hand on the scanner.

Even the fingerprints match.

Progress was made. I was progress. Time to test had come, but I wasn't pleased. People were growing desperate, needing to know something was being done to protect them. Or perfect them. It was hard to say. The last few weeks were difficult, so close and yet there was no real show for it.

Every subject either died, and stayed dead, or rose one of them. Not just a mindless husk, though. These were the perfection of a monster. Tyrants. And here I sat, in my sterile, deadly box, their mother.

I was so proud.

But that wasn't my purpose, so I was told. I had skills, skills to change what I was, who I had become. They needed that change. Needed me to realize that difference, between monster and god and bridge the gap. They wanted me, in a bottle. The only down side of course, was that I had no idea who 'me' was, before this damned box.

The 'day' dragged on, slowly. I call it a day because I have no other way to measure it. I have no clock. No window. I rise, work, and then sleep once I'm too exhausted to do more. I dream, sometimes while I lay torpid, for who-knows how long. Dreams of blood and bodies and devouring things. I never disrobe before I sleep, but always wake naked. I never eat, but never feel hungry. I refuse to do the math, where it lay glaring before me.

This day... something changes. I'm beginning to recall things. People. Faces. I look at the chemical cocktail I've just injected into my veins and realize what it's doing. Just as the thought crosses my mind, I black out.

I wake hot. I never feel hot...

I'm sticky. I blink and it's difficult. Something's in my eyes and it stings, but not for long. My vision is red but there's a reverberation to it. Everything feels like it just stopped vibrating wildly.

My face is buried in the still-hot cavity of a body, ears-deep in it's abdomen. I taste blood and meat and adrenaline. Something grainy, wet, tasting of salt and fear is in my mouth, and I roll it over my tongue, the ripped meat hemorrhaging blood. I blink again. Sound...

Screaming. Drawing back suddenly, forgetting the entrancing tastes and smells assaulting me, I look up and into the glazed, panicked eyes of the human I was just...

Eating.

I swallow what's in my mouth, more out of reaction at this point. Blood spurts in great arcs from the thing... person, I remind myself – on the floor. Aorta pierced, I think to myself. A great pool is spilling, spreading from the... person. He is naked, shivering, hands clawing and scrabbling at the floor vainly. He looks everywhere but at himself, but it's hard to deny the instinct to track motion. Again, a jet of blood flies from his stomach, the arterial pathway to his lower body severed and exposed. Motion draws vision, and again he sees the ruin there.

_Scream_.

Something in me reacts, and I lunge at the man's face – no, his neck. I feel stringy sinew and meat in my teeth and the fierce, butterfly rhythm of a heartbeat, before I simply sever it. I don't question it. I know how this body I wear works. Whatever I need it to do, it will obey. The sound dies between my teeth and I grind the resilient tissue slowly. A vertebrae crunches. My mind is still in shock, partly as memories surface, partly because of the reality of the moment.

I just killed... and ate, a human being. Not the first. Not by a long, long measure. I look up at, and glare at the small black eye in the corner. It doesn't blink. Doesn't react. I do.

I stretch, my body resuming a shape I know it should be in. I lean, sniffing a the body with a curious gesture, mind reeling at the mixed signals I receive. Horror and revulsion in equal parts to hunger and exaltation. Feigning boredom, I curl back up on my cot, and wait. What heart beats in me I still, letting the illusion of sleep rise.

A panel opens and my cracked eye, hidden by a fall of bloody hair, watches. Hazmat suits come in, carry the broken body away. Another comes and approaches me. I force myself still as he pulls a syringe, taking a sample roughly. Something ticks in my memory... the lab. A feeling of torpor... drugs. They drug the 'food'. I should be dead to the world, but not today. Today I not only remember, but am awake. Something in the last test changed me.

I resist the urge to smile.

_Progress was made. I am progress._


End file.
